| |
| Part 1: Capturing the Emotions and
Anguish of War
Listen to Part 1
Featured Poem:
"Dulce Et Decorum Est"
by Wilfred Owen
First Published in 1921
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
|
| Part 2: The Poetry of
National Identity
Listen to Part 2
Featured Poem:
"The Concord Hymn"
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument, July 4, 1837
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, or leave their childern free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
|
|
Part 3: The Gentle and Fierce Sides
of Soldiers
Listen to Part 3
Featured Poems:
"Souvenier of the Ancient World"
by Carlos Drummond de Andrade; translated by Mark Strand
Clara strolled in the garden with the children.
The sky was green over the grass,
the water was golden under the bridges,
other elements were blue and rose and orange,
a policeman smiled, bicycles passed,
a girl stepped onto the lawn to catch a bird,
the whole world -- Germany, China --
All was quiet around Clara.
The children looked at the sky: it was not forbidden.
Mouth, nose, eyes were open. There was no danger.
What Clara feared were the flu, the heat, the insects.
Clara feared missing the eleven o'clock trolley,
waiting for letters slow to arrive,
not always being able to wear a new dress. But
she strolled in the garden, in the morning!
They had gardens, they had mornings in those days!
"Politics"
by William Butler Yeats
HOW can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows What he talks about,
And there's a politician That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!
|
| Part 4: The Legacy of Vietnam
Listen to Part 4
Featured Poem:
"Facing It"
by Yusef
Komunyakaa
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
Read other
poems by Yusef Komunyakaa
|
|
Part 5: Poetry Inspired by September 11th
Listen to Part 5
Featured Poem:
"Newspaper"
by Robert Pinsky
They manufacture newsprint with a grain,
So you can tear straight down a vertical column.
But if you try to tear it crosswise, it rips
Out of control, in jagged scallops and slashes,
Serrated chaos like the blocks of smoking ruin.
Here amid columns is a man who handles
Search dogs. He says the dogs depend on rewards.
But not like the dogs I know, not dog treats: the Lab
Who’ll balance one on his muzzle, trembling and gazing
Up at you till you say “okay!” then he whips
It into the air and snaps it and bolts it whole.
No, what the handler says is that his dogs
Are trained to find survivors—that’s their reward,
Finding somebody alive is what they want.
And when they try and try and never get it,
They get depressed, he says: “These dogs are depressed.”
Yes, what an animal thing depression is,
The craving for some redemption is like a thirst.
It’s in us as we open the morning paper:
Fresh, fallible, plausible. It says the smoke
Was mostly not paper or flesh. First white, the drywall,
Then darker pulverized steel and granite and marble,
And then, long-smouldering toxic plastic and fiber.
In the old days, the printing plant and “the paper”
(Meaning the Globe or Herald or Journal or Times)
Were in one building, and the tremendous rolls
Of newsprint tumbled off the trucks each day.
When I was small one crushed a newsboy’s legs.
There was a fund for him, I remember his picture
Accepting a powered wheelchair or special crutches.
His name would be in the files of the Daily Record.
The one-way grain is like the irrevocable,
Downward river of time set into channels.
Words broadcast on the air don’t seem as solid.
Paper—the bread of Chronos, titanic Time
That eats its children. And the crosswise jumble
That won’t tear straight unless you cut it is like
Darkness innate in things. The weather. The boy
Who beams up at the camera or down at his stumps.
The prisoner who speaks an unknown language
So that his captors guess and call him “the Chechen.”
The errant, granular pulp. In some old stories,
The servant rises early and reads it first,
Then gets the iron and presses it flat and smooth
To place by the master’s breakfast— the skin of
days.
"Curse"
by Frank Bidart
May breath for a dead moment cease as jerking your
head upward you hear as if in slow motion floor
collapse evenly upon floor as one hundred and ten
floors descend upon you.
May what you have made descend upon you.
May the listening ears of your victims their eyes their breath
enter you, and eat like acid
the bubble of rectitude that allowed you breath.
May their breath now, in eternity, be your breath.
Now, as you wished, you cannot for us
not be. May this be your single profit.
Of your rectitude at last disenthralled, you
seek the dead. Each time you enter them
they spit you out. The dead find you are not food.
Out of the great secret of morals,
the imagination to enter
the skin of another,
what I have made is a curse.
|
View Robert Pinsky's Favorite
Poems Project
|
|
